Life Aboard Revenge
by Elvinborn
Summary: AU. In which Arthur is the Dread Pirate "Roberts" and Merlin becomes his valet, and "it was the please that caught his attention." ArthurMerlin
1. Chapter 1

note: because I had this idea and nobody else was writing it, so I've been toying with it for ages

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It was the _please _that caught his attention. One simple word spoken calmly by this... this boy. All of the other prisoners had shown the common decency to be terrified of the Dread Pirate Roberts, and flung themselves at his feet begging for mercy. Naturally, Arthur had killed them all as the Dread Pirate Roberts leaves no survivors. It was a great reputation they had worked hard to cultivate. Besides, all that pleading and sniveling for their lives was so very irritating. Yet, here was this boy, probably a stowaway from the look of him, looking Arthur directly in the eye with an expression that made Arthur feel like a simpleton. Arthur did not approve.

"Please, I want to live," the boy said, apparently taking Arthur's silence as an invitation to speak. It had been no such thing, but the words seemed to make something shimmer in the air around them.

"Alright," Arthur replied. "What's so important that you have to live for?" he asked. Not that he cared.

"Destiny," came the perplexing response.

"Destiny," Arthur repeated flatly, hoping for some further elaboration. When none seemed to be forthcoming, Arthur tried one more time. "Would you care to add to that rather petty excuse? You must realize that only an idiot would think that some sort of mysterious _destiny _would be enough to frighten the Dread Pirate Roberts himself into letting you continue breathing on his ship?"

"No," replied the boy, with a smile that Arthur found instantly infuriating. "I think the word, 'destiny' will make the Dread Pirate _Arthur _very curious, and even a complete prat would allow a probable stowaway from a captured ship to live just a little longer if only to discover how he knows that there is no pirate aboard called 'Roberts.'"

Arthur stared for a moment before lowering his sword. "Right," he said, his voice hoarse. He cleared his throat. "Right," he said more strongly this time. He considered the odd man kneeling before him. "You have a name, master destiny?"

"Merlin."

Something in the air _shifted_. "Merlin," Arthur repeated, tasting the name. It felt familiar, though he knew he had never heard it before.

"Alright then, Merlin," Arthur began, stretching the name out as he said it just to irritate the boy, "I've never had a valet. You can fill that position while you are with us, which probably won't be long as I will most likely kill you in the morning." Arthur enjoyed a moment's satisfaction at the surprise that flickered across Merlin's face. Arthur did have lots of annoying little chores with which he could torture the boy, and the crew might enjoy a bit of a break. This could prove to be quite entertaining.


	2. Learning the Ropes

comments are loved and adored. thank you for reading!!

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It was a fine time for Merlin aboard the _Revenge_. While Arthur always had some insane (some might say impossible) list of daily chores for Merlin, he always seemed to finish the list before midday. After that, he could be found watching Arthur drilling his men at swords or down with the ship's doctor, Gaius, making potions and asking more questions than any one person could hope to answer.

Arthur could not figure out how it was possible to clean and polish everything in the captain's cabin so quickly. It should have taken Merlin several days to complete the chores on Arthur's list, indeed, it should have taken five men at least a week to perform the tasks (not that Arthur would tell Merlin that). Instead, he took on the challenge to discover how long and ridiculous the list could get before his cheerful new valet cracked.

It didn't work.

After weeks of torture in which Merlin was required to clean, oil, and scrape every splinter of the entire ship, Revenge was shining, and Merlin was smiling and joking with all of the crew. To top that off, the crew was starting to get a bit lazy as the menial tasks that usually kept them occupied had all been handed to the grinning idiot.

Arthur cracked first.

Merlin was hanging happily over the water in a sling where he was supposed to be debarnacling the entire hull of the ship. It had been only an hour, and Merlin wasn't working, but Revenge's hull gleamed as she rose out of the water on the crests of the waves.

"How are you doing it?" Arthur demanded.

Merlin jumped like a frightened rabbit and tangled himself so completely in his harnessing that he ended up hanging upside down by his ankle, and, possibly, a bit of his shaggy black hair. Surprising really, that the hair had caught and not one of those ridiculous ears.

"What?" Merlin asked, voice a bit ruffled by the knee currently smashed against his face.

Arthur laughed. "For goodness sake, Merlin," he said. "How is it that you haven't fallen overboard and drowned yourself with grace such as yours?" As he spoke, Arthur hauled Merlin up and dropped him in a tangle on the deck.

"Ow," the Merlin pile moaned.

Arthur found a hand and started untangling his valet. "You really are the greatest idiot to sail the oceans, aren't you?" he asked, vaguely disturbed by the fondness he heard and felt in that statement.

Merlin tilted his head and met Arthur's gaze with a slightly terrifying (though Arthur would never admit it) smile. "I don't know," Merlin replied, "are you the biggest prat ever to sail?" Oddly, Arthur found himself smiling in return. When had name-calling become endearment?

Arthur retreated to his original question. "How are you doing it?"

Merlin looked at him, confused. "Doing what? Failing miserably at being a sailor?"

"No," Arthur replied, waving a hand, "you're actually not the absolute worst sailor I've ever seen." Merlin started to beam at him, so Arthur quickly qualified his statement, "But you are still really pathetically awful." The idiot's smile actually got bigger. He looked like a simpleton. This conversation was not going at all as planned, and the crew members were starting to stop their work to stare. Not that they didn't make an interesting show: the Dread Pirate Roberts -- most fearsome pirate ever to sail -- tangled in a bit of harnessing with his own clumsy waif of a valet and, apparently, being bested in conversation.

Arthur stood up and looked around. "Back to work, you lot!" he yelled, "or you'll be finding yourself cleaning Morgana's wardrobe for the next week!" It was an empty threat, but the men didn't have to know that. Morgana would never let them near her things. Besides which, Arthur thought Merlin might have taken care of that chore yesterday as it had been on his list, and Morgana had taken a liking to Merlin.

"I did that already," Merlin muttered so that only Arthur could hear him.

"Yes, well, don't tell any of the men. What would I threaten them with then? You've already done the worst chores Revenge has to offer." Arthur focused his gaze on Merlin again. "How have you been doing that, by the way?"

"What?"

"How have you managed, in one week, to complete a list of tasks that should take twenty men more than a month to achieve?"

"I knew it!"

Oops. Arthur hadn't meant to let slip just how ridiculous Merlin's assignments had been. "No! I didn't mean..."

"I _knew _it wasn't possible to recaulk all of the deck seams in a single morning!" Merlin crowed. "But, no! Gwen and Lancelot were both adamant that you would never do such a thing as give me a task that was completely impossible when my _life _was the forfeit for failure. 'Arthur's a good guy,' they said. 'You must have misread,' they said." Merlin's arms were sweeping through the air as he paced and ranted. The men, at least, had the decency to not simply gawp at the tableau. Arthur was quietly grateful. "The lengths I had to go to to convince those barnacles to bugger off to find another ship..." Merlin stopped mid-flail and stared at Arthur, his mouth hanging open.

"The lengths you went to in order to do _what_?" Arthur prompted, knowing that Merlin had just given him a key to his mystery.

"Um..." was the eloquent reply.

"Um," Arthur said derisively. "Um, what? You talk to sea life? Not that such a thing is possible. Are you secretly a merman?" Not that the second option was much better than the first.

Merlin laughed. "Was that really the best explanation you could come up with?"

"It was short notice! You start talking about 'convincing' sea animals of things, and I just said the first thing that came to mind!"

"I am not a merman, Arthur. First of all, they have fins. Do you see any fins? Gills? Scales maybe?"

"They could be under your tunic! Who knows where you come from, Merlin!" Arthur ranted, hands gesturing wildly, "you were a stowaway who said he was 'destined to be here' with your big blue eyes and your really quite absurd ears. I don't know!"

Merlin calmly took Arthur's hand into his own and met his gaze. "Arthur. I'm not a sea creature. I am, however, a little bit magic." He looked nervously at Arthur, waiting for some sort of response.

"Magic." Arthur smiled at Merlin, thinking of the possibilities of having his own (highly illegal, likely to get his head chopped off the moment he stepped on land) wizard. "I think I can handle that."


End file.
